Deep amid the dense greenery of a rain forest, U.S. Forest Service scientists are nursing a special patient back to health.
The patient is on pain medication, but lucid enough to ruffle his emerald green feathers and fill the room with angry squawks when a biologist removes him from an incubator. It is a Puerto Rican parrot with a broken leg, a serious injury for one of the world's most endangered bird species.
In the past, the prognosis would have been grim. "That probably would have been a dead bird," said Jafet Velez, a biologist who manages the Puerto Rican parrot breeding center in the El Yunque National Forest, one of two such facilities on the island.
The injured bird, a 2-month-old known only as Number 111405, faces an extended stay in the avian equivalent of intensive care and may need surgery. But it is likely to survive. The outlook is increasingly positive as well for the entire species, which has hovered near extinction for decades, with slightly more than a dozen left in the wild at one point.
There are now about 150 birds each in the two captive breeding centers, in El Yunque and in Rio Abajo. Both breeding centers report a record year for new chicks, about 40 each.
Puerto Rican parrots are one of about 34 species of Amazon parrots found in the Americas. They’re known for the bright red shock of feathers at their forehead, white rings around their eyes and the shimmering blue feathers under their wings, usually visible when they dart overhead.
The parrots, which grow to about a foot in length and mate for life, are secretive and considered exceptionally sensitive to any disturbance to their environment, which may be why their numbers plummeted in the wild.
In pre-colonial times, there were an estimated 1 million of the birds spread across Puerto Rico. Intensive agriculture, particularly the massive clearing of forests for sugar cane, coffee and citrus, and a series of devastating hurricanes destroyed most of their prime habitat. By the late 1960s, they had disappeared from the entire island, except a few dozen in El Yunque, a mountainous tropical rain forest east of San Juan. In 1975, a census found just 13 birds left in the wild.
The captive breeding program began in 1972, but there wasn't much hope for a recovery.
"They thought the species is going to be extinct, so we need to keep in captivity a representation of what was a Puerto Rican parrot," said Velez, who has worked for the program for 21 years. "But the species really showed resilience."
The breeding efforts picked up as they learned more about the species and reduced turnover among biologists and technicians, which enabled them to become more skillful in handling the birds.